What the River Takes and How You’ll Never Get it Back
Brenna DixonWhat the River Takes and How You’ll Never Get it Back
Quetzal and I picked our way down the clay embankment, past the sign screaming at us to BE AWARE. BOATERS SERIOUSLY INJURED BY JUMPING STURGEON.
“Look at you, Ms. Rebel,” he said. “Sneaking out and shit. Shouldn’t you be doing homework?” He grinned and slung a tan arm around my shoulders.
Suarez crouched over Carrine on the shore, ran his hands over her faded yellow hull.
"Dude, I don't think it's going to ride," said Suarez. He stood back and squinted at the jet ski.
"What do you mean 'ride'?" I asked. "There's no way it's fixed yet. We found it three weeks ago."
"She's got a point," said Suarez.
Quetzal bent to look it over. "She's fine," he said. "I did the spark plugs last night."
He walked a circle around the jet ski, bending every once in awhile to poke at something, as if examining the Carrine—the one with owl eyes and straight teeth.
"I already checked it," said Suarez.
Quetzal stood. "Today," he said. "I'm going to feel up a sturgeon. Fishing contest’s coming up."
Quetzal always made everything into a grand announcement.
“You’re resorting to feeling up fish now? Because Carrine won’t let you get under her shirt?” I crossed my arms and leveled Quetzal with my eyes.
He took three quick steps toward me, dug around in his pockets, and handed me his pocketknife.
"Hold this," he said. "I don't want to lose it. And don’t be jealous."
I rolled my eyes. "Yeah. Right. That’s it. I’m jealous. The DNR comes through every twenty minutes, Quetzal," I said.
"They're switching shifts right now. No worries."
He stripped off his shirt, wheeled Carrine around, and shoved off into the water.
"Idiot," I muttered.
Suarez sat in the grass. "Tomorrow he's going to want to touch ten of the damn things."
"I swear his brain's an incubator for stupid sometimes," I said. I sat next to Suarez and he moved over so our knees wouldn't touch.
"Incubator?" said Suarez. He raised an eyebrow at me. "What are you, a farmer?"
"Shut up," I said. "I'm studying for the SATs."
"That's not till the end of the year, goody-goody."
I flipped Quetzal's knife open then closed.
"Yeah, well, when I pass and you're stuck working at Lowes, I'll be sure to write from UF."
Suarez rolled his eyes. Quetzal crisscrossed the water, coming close enough to spray us.
"Quetzal!" shouted Suarez. "You're never going to touch one if you don't cut that shit out!"
I checked my watch. In half an hour my mother would poke her straight nose into my room, see me gone, then look for the rowboat, see it gone, and brainstorm a new way to ground me.
Quetzal killed the motor and sat in the center of the river, waiting. I twisted his shirt around my hand.
"Did you bring a flashlight?" asked Suarez.
I shook my head. "No."
In the fading light, a sturgeon leapt past Quetzal, hanging in mid-air for full seconds before crashing into the river. The second one got close enough to knock the handlebars on the way down. The jet ski rocked on the water.
Suarez sat back and laughed. "I predict a face-plant."
Quetzal leaned far over the water, stretching his fingers out and away.
"Holy shit," said Suarez. "He's going to do it. He's seriously going for it."
"He's just trying to impress Carrine," I said. I closed my eyes. The last rays of sun warmed my cheeks. “He even named our—our—jet ski after her, Suarez.”
"Carrine's not even here," said Suarez. "Plus, she's a cock-tease."
"Yeah, well," I said. "All I know is he's wearing button-down shirts now."
"Whatever. Are you watching this?"
I opened my eyes. A sturgeon flung itself out of the water and twisted in the air.
"Look at that thing," said Suarez. "It's got to be at least eight feet long."
Quetzal reached and reached.
"He's going to fall off," I said. I poked holes in the mud next to me.
The sturgeon collided with him, slammed into him with the sound of a head smacking concrete. Quetzal and the fish tangled together, limbs and fins. They hit the water as one.
"Fuck," I said. "Oh, fuck."
We waited a minute.
"Suarez, he's not moving.”
"I know," he said.
He ran a hand through his curly hair. "He better not be playing around."
We plunged into the river.
The night before the funeral, Señora rowed out to my family's houseboat. The weight of our boat shifted, then stabilized, as she stepped aboard. My mother watched from the porthole while I tied off her rowboat.
"Hello, Jae," said Señora. "May I sit with you?"
"Sure," I said. I sat on the edge of the deck, my toes dangling inches from the water. Señora tucked her legs beneath her skirts.
"My mom's probably listening through the glass," I said.
Señora smiled. "It’s what mothers do."
I brushed a moth off my shirt and watched it fly toward the porthole light.
"I want to ask you something," said Señora. She looked me in the eye.
"Okay," I said.
'Would you speak tomorrow? For Quetzal?"
I picked at a sliver of deck wood. We both stared out toward the white limestone banks.
"Not Suarez?" I asked.
She shook her head. "No. Quetzal trusted you."
My stomach clenched.
"Because of Hawkinsville?" I asked.
"Of course," said Señora.
I tossed splintered pieces of wood into the water. I knew we were both thinking of Amelia. Of the way her ashes floated over the Hawkinsville City steamboat's creaking wreckage.
"I don't think I'd do a good job," I said.
"I'm sure you'd do just fine," Señora said. Wisps of long, dark hair escaped from her bun. She let them fall in her eyes before tucking them behind her ears.
The boat rocked beneath us.
"I'm failing public speaking. The last time I spoke in front of a group of people I passed out. In front of my whole class."
Señora was quiet for a moment. "Oh, honey."
"My mom doesn't know yet," I said. "Please don't tell her."
She laid a thin, brown hand on my knee. My skin looked so pale beneath her fingers. I shrugged and managed a half-smile.
"I don't think I could talk about Quetzal in front of a bunch of people."
Señora hugged me tight. She smelled like cinnamon. My throat tightened and my eyes burned.
"You can," she said. "Everyone there loves you and loves Quetzal. There will be no judge."
A sturgeon broke the water in front of us, sailed in our direction, and fell short. It hit the side of the boat with a loud thump. Señora gasped and pulled me back against the deck. Her grip stung my wrist. I twisted loose. She took my face in her hands, her back straight against the boat wall.
"Are you alright?" she asked.
Her dark eyes, normally squinted from smiling, sat wide and unblinking in her face.
The door slammed open and my mother's frazzled head peered out the door.
"What was that?" she asked.
"Sturgeon," I said. "Everything's fine."
"You're okay?" she asked. She twisted her hands nervously.
I nodded. "I'll come inside in a minute, okay? We'll have tea."
My mother cut her eyes over to Señora. "I'm sorry about your son," she said. She disappeared inside.
Señora crossed herself and kissed my forehead. We leaned against the outer wall of the boat, our legs tucked close to our bodies. The water went still again.
"Jae," said Señora. She took my hands. "Please speak tomorrow. It would mean so much."
I thought about all the times she'd fed me tostones and pork, all the times Quetzal stuck up for me.
"Okay," I said. "I'll try."
She kissed my cheeks. “Thank you.”
Señora stepped into her rowboat and settled behind the oars. She sat straight and tall as I untied her and pushed her off. I leaned over the side and searched our hull for cracks. My mother's face hovered in the window.
I stood at the funeral pulpit and counted faces. Seventy-six people watched me learn the impossibility of delivering a eulogy for my best friend. Construction workers banged on the roof of the church. Fine white flakes fell down the front of my black dress and dusted the podium. Suarez watched me from the first pew, rolling his tie around his fingers then letting it loose.
Palm fronds brushed against the stained glass windows and sent a tightness up my throat from the pit of my chest. The A.C. unit turned on, buzzed for several minutes, and clicked off. Someone coughed toward the back. My dress clung to my legs in the heat.
I tapped the mic once. No feedback. I stared at the words on the paper, words that meant Quetzal was gone. When the doors creaked open, everyone turned.
"Sorry. Sorry," whispered the girl in the grey dress.
Carrine took my empty seat beside Suarez.
"I was sitting there," I said. The words echoed across the church before I could think to stop them.
"Oh," said Carrine. She scooted over a little.
Señora smoothed her dress over her knees. The tips of my fingers went numb and my head went swimmy. I stared at Carrine and tried to see in her what Quetzal saw.
Thin blonde hair.
Slim grey dress.
Knobby knees.
Obnoxious eyebrows.
"Quetzal was kind," I said. The words felt stale on my tongue.
I clutched Quetzal's eulogy in my fist and sweated through the paper. Carrine started crying—big ugly sobs. Overdramatic sobs.
"Quetzal," I said, louder. "He—“
"Jae," said Señora and my stomach went nauseous. Red candles burned around Quetzal's casket, a hunk of the Spanish moss he loved so much curling across the wood like a woman's hair.
I wiped my palms on my dress.
"Quetzal loved his little sister," I said. My fingers tingled and my vision blurred. I closed my eyes and kept them closed. I focused on the pulpit’s flat wood against my palms.
"I miss him," I said.
Heels clicked up the steps to the pulpit and then Señora's hands were on my shoulders.
"Come down, honey," she said, her voice thick.
I opened my eyes a sliver and stepped down from the pulpit. I handed Señora Quetzal's eulogy.
"I'm sorry," I said.
She hugged me tight, her thin body pressed against my own. I wanted to curl up under the pew until every last person was gone.
After the funeral I dreamed about faces: Quetzal's blank eyes peering up from the darkness of his wooden box. Señora's face, drawn down with mourning. The smell of dirt all over my hands. I woke at two in the morning, sweaty in my sheets, my stomach in fist-sized knots. The boat floor swayed beneath me. My mother coughed in her sleep on the couch. I made tea and tried to forget the Suwannee’s dark water.
The river blessing was a week after we buried Quetzal. I found a spot in the grass near the grill tent and waited for Suarez. Quetzal loved the river blessing as much as he loved the spring Red Belly Festival.
"Only difference is at the river blessing, you don't have to catch your own food. Just bring burgers instead of bait for fish," he told me once. Until I met Quetzal, I'd never been to a river blessing.
People filtered past wearing jeans and sneakers. Suarez sat beside me in basketball shorts and Jordans.
"No one's going to swim this year," I said.
Suarez shook his head. "Check out all the signs they put up."
BEWARE: STURGEON signs stood every three feet along the riverbank.
"I want a burger," said Suarez. He stared up at the smoking grills. "You want one?"
"I'm not hungry," I said.
He sat back and picked grass. I pulled Quetzal's pocketknife out and flipped it open.
"You still have that?" asked Suarez.
I nodded. "Yeah." It felt warm and heavy in my palm. I placed it in the grass between Suarez and I. It burned between us.
"How's SAT studying going?" Suarez asked. "Learn any more big-ass words?"
"Auxiliary," I said. "And esoteric.”
"This blows," said Suarez.
Around four, Father Rawlins stepped up to the water. He didn't lift his clerical robes to reveal board shorts. No one yelled "Hey, Pops!" and tossed him a beer. He simply stood ankle deep in the river and stared out at the rolling sturgeon.
"We bless this river as our fathers and mothers did, and their mothers and fathers before them, and before them, and before them," he said.
I mouthed these words along with him as I had a dozen times before. They slipped easily from between my lips. Mosquitoes bit my mosquito bites. I slathered mud along my limbs. Father Rawlins let a palmful of water slip through his fingers. In the middle of the river, sturgeon leapt and splashed.
"This river has been good to us always," Father Rawlins continued. "It has quenched our thirst and fed our commerce and filled our bellies."
Señora Williams sat in a chair at the edge of the water, her legs tucked beneath her skirts. Every so often she set her glass down and shook condensation from her hands, but mostly she kept her eyes on the pines and palms and scrub lining the opposite bank. Quetzal's jetski was gone, towed away to the junkyard across town.
Carrine stepped out of the crowd. She wore a white sundress and a pearl ribbon in her hair.
"Today the river blesses this young woman," said Father Rawlins. "Today God gives her new life."
Father Rawlins spread his arms out and beckoned Carrine forward. She stepped between two signs, waded into the water until the hem of her dress soaked through. Father Rawlins led her into deeper water. He pushed her under. Two of our classmates threw a football back and forth over a beached DNR boat. People at the grill tent turned their heads toward the river then resumed their conversations. A sturgeon leapt a few yards from Father Rawlins then fell back through the surface.
Carrine emerged dripping from the river. Father Rawlins followed. A few people clapped. Father Rawlins took Señora's hands, bowed his head to hers, and blessed her.
Señora held his hands in silence.
I picked a clump of Spanish moss apart one strand at a time, and watched Carrine wring out her hair. She picked her way toward us through the crowd. All along the way, people placed hands on her shoulders, fingered her hair. When she reached us she sat with her back to the river.
"Hi," said Suarez.
Carrine ignored him and stared at me. "You're not going to apologize?"
"For what?" I asked. My gut twisted.
"You know what," she said. "The funeral. Quetzal was my friend, too."
"Is that why you baptized yourself?" I asked. "In his memory?"
"You don't know anything about me," Carrine said. She shivered. I could see her bra through her dress, lacy, probably mail-ordered from Victoria’s Secret.
"I don't need to know any more than I already do."
"Jae," said Suarez. "You know it's not her fault."
My face flushed. I wanted to smack him.
"She was always mean to him," I said. I turned to her. "You were always mean to him. Even after Amelia died. And don't pretend you didn't know. The whole town knew."
I picked up Quetzal's pocketknife. "I have to go."
*
I slipped on flippers and a snorkel mask near the U.S. 90 bridge. Without a scuba tank I'd have to hold my breath. I waded into the river and swam to the middle. Every so often a sturgeon launched itself out of the water and my heart beat a little faster.
I ducked my head under and kicked until I could just see the top of the wreck. City of Hawkinsville. The old steamboat had been Quetzal’s last obsession. Before the sturgeon. I'm not sure why he never told Suarez about our dives.
The boiler area was our favorite. I dove, held my breath hard, and squinted into the sun-greened water. There were the algae-covered boilers, round and fuzzy, and there was the bit of railing where Quetzal scratched his sister's name. I kicked deeper. My lungs burned. I surfaced for air. I think what fascinated Quetzal was the fact that such destruction could be buried under so much still water.
Cars whizzed across the bridge.
The sun beat on my head.
I gripped the pocketknife tight, breathed deep, and dove.
I kicked my way down through the layer of warm water and entered the cold. Goosebumps peppered my skin. I moved along the railing, quickly, hand over hand, searching for Amelia's name: AMELIA WILLIAMS, 2 YRS. The scratch marks were old and deep, grown over with algae. She would have been six now. I scraped the green away with my knife and cleared a patch beside her name.
I'd never held my breath this long before. It hurt. Carefully, I cut Quetzal's name into the rotting metal. Then: 16 YRS. I stared at the lines until I saw black spots. I kicked for the surface. When the sturgeon slammed into the back of my knees, for a second I thought it was Quetzal playing around the way he used to—sneaking up beneath me like a shark or an alligator, using his fingernails as teeth.
I flailed into deeper water. Beneath the surface, shadow shapes bent and swayed with the current, dampened at the edges like oversaturated watercolors, rubbed like Quetzal’s charcoal drawings. My breath bubbled up in fat, shifting globs. My existence became a whorl of mud. I watched tiny specks float against the sunlight.
I held my breath until my lungs burned again. Water filled my ears, deadened my thoughts.
A calmness.
The muffled rush of the current.
A pale face floated nearby and I swear I saw Quetzal's dark eyes attached to thick aquatic lips, lips perfect for bottom-feeding. Thick whiskers brushed my face. I thought to kick.
Up, I thought. Up, up, up.
On shore, I threw up streams of water, inhaled, breathed deep, tasted that humid Floridian air like it was key lime pie, sweet and sour and delicious.
At school people avoided me. Whole sections of the cafeteria cleared out when Suarez and I sat down. We were outcasts.
"It's because of me," I said.
"Yeah, maybe," he said. "You were kind of a bitch to Carrine."
I bit harder into my apple.
Carrine started the rumors about Quetzal when he was alive, so I knew it must have been Carrine who started the rumors about his death: Quetzal steered the jet ski into the sturgeon on purpose. Quetzal jumped off in the middle of the river, wearing weights. Quetzal's body was found half-eaten by alligators because Suarez and I didn't tell the cops in time. Because of her, our classmates whispered about us, whispered about Quetzal. Bullshit.
I got sick of everyone's pity. People who didn't avoid me stared at me, patted me on the shoulder. A girl I hadn't spoken to since grade school hugged me in front of Target. At home, my mother made my favorite foods because it was just the two of us, because first it was my dad and brother in the car accident and then it was Quetzal. Eating mashed potatoes felt like swallowing a wet blanket. I missed Adobo seasoning and sazon.
"Eat more," my mother said.
I wished Señora would talk to me. We never ran into each other anymore.
On the two-month anniversary of Quetzal's death, I snuck out and rowed for Señora's house. Deep water swallowed my oars. Ibises flocked to my left, dipped their beaks in mud for food. A great blue heron croaked and took off from an old oak. Far off down the river, red and blue lights glowed from the top of a DNR boat. I dragged my rowboat up the bank and knocked on her door before I could think too much about it.
Señora came to the door in a deep green shawl, the mascara around her eyes a little smeared.
"Jae," she said.
I hugged her. "I'm sorry for messing up my speech."
She laid her cheek on top of my head, rubbed my back.
"Come inside," she said. "Sit."
Señora scooped arroz con pollo onto a yellow plate and placed it in front of me. I downed the whole thing—warm, salty, rich—in under a minute. I was starving.
"Eat more. You're too thin," she said, putting more food on my plate.
Her small home overlooked the river. I hadn't been over since Quetzal's wake.
Señora filled the coffeepot with dark grounds.
"I read your eulogy today," said Señora. "He loved you, too, Jae. You were his best friend."
"I miss him," I said.
Señora was silent for a moment, wiping her hands absently on her apron.
"He was a good boy," she said.
"I went to Hawkinsville," I said.
Beans sputtered in the pot and Señora reached to turn the burner down.
"Come look," she said. She pointed to the ibises roosting in the trees on the riverbank closest to the window.
"Do you want to know something?" she asked.
I nodded.
"Birds are only beautiful to us because they are beautiful to each other," she said.
“Quetzal told me that once,” I said.
Señora smiled. “You know. You should really call me Dina.” She took my hand. “Now tell me how my Amelia is doing.”
She poured coffee and I drank.
I found Suarez by his locker the next day talking to Carrine again.
"We're going fishing," said Suarez. "We're going to catch a sturgeon. We owe it to Quetzal."
"You're going fishing with her?" I asked.
Carrine scrunched up her nose and slapped me hard across the face.
"What the hell?" I yelled. My face stung.
"You don't know anything about Quetzal and me," she said. "You don't know. So stop acting like you're in some special little club."
"You barely knew Quetzal," I said. "All you did was make him chase you."
Carrine's face crumpled.
"Oh come on," I said. "Are you really going to start crying again? No one's buying it."
"Jae," Suarez said. "Cut it out."
I couldn't stop. I hated her even though I knew I had no right or reason to hate her.
Someone slammed the locker next to me and we all jumped.
"I have class," said Carrine. She disappeared into a classroom down the hall.
I turned to Suarez. "What the hell? She hit me."
"You're acting like a psycho." He crossed his arms over his chest.
The late bell rang before I could find the words to explain the hole I felt swallowing my insides.
"See you at lunch," said Suarez. "In the library."
Suarez, Carrine, and I sat between the back bookshelves and pored over articles and photos and books about the Gulf sturgeon. We learned the grey-brown of their prehistoric bodies, the peach of their pectoral fins. We memorized their solid armor—the skeletons they wore outside their bodies. We discovered their lack of teeth and the way they bottom-feed by suction.
Suarez looked up from an old fishing guide.
"They're listed as threatened. It's illegal to catch and kill them."
Carrine slid a photo into the middle of our circle. "Look at this," she said.
I ignored her, but after a minute I had to look.
The photo showed a young woman sitting in a wrecked boat, her face swollen, her eyes blacked and bruised. Blood trickled from her hairline. I flipped it over. Suarez looked a little pale.
"What?" said Carrine. "I'm just saying, that's what sturgeon are capable of."
"Quetzal looked worse," I said.
Carrine bit her lip. "I didn't know it hit him in the head. I thought it just knocked him over. That he drowned." She twisted her hands in her lap. Had she not hit me in the hallway, I would've felt bad for her.
"Yeah, well," I said. I stared at the back of the photo. "We can't do anything illegal. We graduate in May. College applications ask about that kind of thing."
"Seriously?" said Suarez.
"I can't stay here my whole life," I said. “Not in a place where people like her exist.”
The bell rang. We left the pile of books on the floor.
After school, I slung my backpack and a bag of groceries (milk, bread, chicken breasts) into the rowboat and set off for home. My mother hardly left the boat anymore, so I wasn't surprised to see her sitting on deck in a swimsuit. I tied off and lugged my bags up.
"What are you reading?" I asked.
"Do you really want to know?" she asked.
"Yeah," I said. Lying on her beach towel, my mother looked almost normal. Like she wasn’t a woman with a dead husband and a dead son.
She held up her book: The Search for Certainty: Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics.
"Oh," I said. “Didn’t that guy you used to teach with write that?”
Mom locked eyes with me for a moment. “Yes, but he’s dead now.”
I headed for the door. A jagged hole a little shorter than me opened into the side of our home.
"What happened to the boat?"
Mom looked up from her book, eyes sleepy with sun. "Sturgeon.”
I dropped my bags and stepped over the broken board edges. There, in the dim living room, lay a five-foot sturgeon. I leaned down and touched its back. The scutes felt dry and rocky beneath my fingers. I followed its body to the head. Its gills fanned in and out, searching for breath. I grabbed it by the tail and pulled back toward the opening. The fish whipped its body to the right, then the left, a giant writhing muscle. I lost my grip and fell onto the edge of the hole. A nail dug into my arm. I bit back a yell and stood.
"You okay?" asked my mom.
"I'm fine," I shouted back.
I walked over to the sturgeon. It lay on its side in the sun, one fin waving in the air. Warm blood trickled down the back of my arm. I stared at the fish's soft, white belly.
I kicked it.
"Stupid," I said.
I kicked it again. And again. I kicked until my leg was tired and my arm was too sore to lift and the sturgeon wasn't moving anymore. Its gills lifted twice more then went still. I nudged it with my toe. Nothing.
"Shit," I said. "Oh, shit. Oh, no."
I bent over the fish and felt along its side. It didn't move. I fumbled for my cell phone.
"Meet me at the bend, okay?" I told Suarez.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Just meet me there in fifteen," I said.
I hung up and stuck my head outside the hole. My mother flipped pages. I dragged the fish into the sun and dug some rope out of a kitchen cabinet. The sturgeon's body scraped against the deck. I shoved it to the edge of the boat and over. It floated. I hopped in the rowboat and pulled the sturgeon toward me.
"Jae?" said my mother. She peered over the railing at me.
"I'm getting the fish off our boat," I said. I wrapped coils of rope around its bony body and through the oarlocks. The fish swiveled its eye around at me. My stomach lurched.
"I'll be back before dinner," I said.
I stretched the oars out into the water. My arms ached from the added weight of the sturgeon. I hoped that moving through the river would filter water through its gills. I hoped it would live. It had to live.
I allowed myself to think of my father. Just this once. To think of the chant he taught me when he sat me behind the oars as a kid.
When I die, please bury me deep.
Just place two oars down by my feet.
Don’t cry for me. Don’t shed no tear.
Just pack my coffin with rowing gear.
I breathed air into my muscles and cut water till the middle of the river where I paused to check that the sturgeon’s gills were still moving. I splashed water over my burning shoulders. The slow current barely moved us off course. Here and there a sturgeon rolled the surface. An osprey wheeled above, chirping.
“Alright, fish. You and me,” I said. I stretched my fingers over the oar handles and dragged us forward.
When I reached shallower water, I untied one rope and then the other. The sturgeon floated to the surface. I sat on the edge of the boat and dropped anchor. The boat tipped dangerously close to the water under my weight. I jumped in. The sturgeon's pale belly floated above me. I surfaced and wrapped my arms around it. The fish twisted a little in my grip, but not enough to fight away from me.
I pulled the sturgeon through the water with me. Its body stretched nearly the length of my own. Its whiskers trailed against my arm. The water stung my nail wound. The sturgeon's muscles tensed and my heart sped up. It wasn't strong enough to move.
Suarez waved at me from shore. Carrine stood with her hands on her hips.
"What are you doing?" shouted Suarez. He waded into the water. Carrine stripped to her bikini (her stupid skinny body) and followed.
“Why’s she here?” I asked. “Go home, Carrine,” I told her.
“She was with me when you called,” Suarez said.
I glared at him. I wanted to punch him. The fish squirmed.
“Just help me, Suarez.”
Carrine came to the edge of the water.
"Wow," she said. "It's a sturgeon."
"No shit, Sherlock," said Suarez. "What happened?"
"It hit my house," I said. And then I started to laugh. I couldn't stop. It came up out of me unbidden. "A sturgeon hit my house, Suarez."
He laughed, too, and treaded water beside me, ran his hand along its side. Its gills took in water every so often. It swished its tail a little.
"It's moving, you guys," said Carrine. She looked nervous.
"We have to get it strong enough to swim," I said.
"If we do that it's going to hurt you," said Suarez.
"We'll be careful," I said.
"You helping, Carrine?" asked Suarez.
She took a deep breath and plunged into the water. "Yes."
"Let's pass it around. Maybe that'll help," I said. I pushed the sturgeon out in front of me a little then shoved it toward Suarez, forcing it to swim the little it could. Suarez swam out to meet it where it stopped. He pushed it toward Carrine.
“Don’t kill it,” I told her.
“You’re such a bitch,” she said. She pushed the sturgeon at me all wrong and it careened off to the side.
“See? See what you did?” I said.
I swam after it and caught it by the tail. I tucked it under my arm so that its gills brushed open and closed against my skin.
"Wake up," I told the sturgeon. "I'm sorry."
I passed the fish back to Suarez. Suarez passed it to Carrine and she to me. We pushed it back and forth, back and forth, until with a burst of energy, the fish sped into me, knocking the wind out of my chest. I choked. Gasped. It hovered in front of me. I turned the fish around and shoved it toward open water. It shot off then stopped. "Suarez, push it again," I said.
Suarez swam out and shoved the fish. It bolted and sunk beneath the surface before reappearing again.
"It's too far," said Carrine
I swam out to the sturgeon, approached it carefully. Its scutes looked brown in the water. It looked me in the eye. I pushed it.
"Go away," I said.
It thrashed at the surface, rolled, then came to rest in front of Carrine. She shrieked. “It almost hit me.”
I swam at the sturgeon again, but it was gone before my third stroke. Suarez floated on his back. I ducked under the water and squinted around for the fish, saw nothing but Carrine’s long, pale legs hovering feet above the muddy bottom. Underwater, her feet could’ve been my own.
Brenna Dixon
Buddy the Python
It had been a mistake, Lyla thought, to buy the snake. They’d named it Buddy—she and Kyle together—Buddy the Python. Admittedly they’d been a little drunk and trolling Craigslist for awkward missed connections when they’d come across the one about “the guy with the hot arms and the freaking awesome snake.”
“Metaphorical snake?” Kyle had asked.
Lyla’d rolled her eyes.
But the next day, hung over from too much tequila, they’d sipped coffee and hidden out stakeout-style at SW 305th and Krome—the intersection listed on Craigslist. Kyle watched one side of the street and Lyla watched the other and eventually the snake guy had emerged from the Sabor Tropical Supermarket they went to once in awhile for green plantains and fresh sofrito.
“Huh,” Lyla said. “He does have nice arms.”
Kyle groaned and slipped further into the passenger seat, too hungover for his usual witticism. “Go live with him then.”
They’d been having problems.
“I’m going to ask about his snake,” Lyla said. She’d grinned even though the sun chewed through her sunglasses straight into her brain.
She caught the snake guy when he got to her side of the street. Up close the snake guy was shorter than he’d seemed—maybe 5’7” to her 5’4”—and oddly enough he was dressed in a suit. A nice suit, one not wrinkled at all. The python wrapped itself around his shoulders, casually, like a cape or a cloak or, well, a boa.
“Hi,” Lyla said. “Nice snake.”
“Yep, he’s a good one,” said the guy. He kept staring over her shoulder, past her, like he was looking for something. Or someone. His forehead furrowed with thought. Lyla guessed that he was in his mid-to-late thirties.
It was then that Lyla decided to be someone else. She was often wanting to be someone else. This inclination had gotten her into trouble as a child and had carried through to adulthood. She’d met Kyle, for example, on a day when she’d been pretending to be more lighthearted than she actually was.
“So,” Lyla said, drawing her finger along Snake Guy’s sleeve, trying to ignore the queasy pit in her stomach. “I saw you the other night.”
This got his attention. He quirked an eyebrow at her. “Yeah? Where?”
“Here. I thought you were so—” She twirled a finger through her auburn hair. The gesture felt unnatural to her, so she told herself she was being a Brittney for the time being. All the Brittneys she’d ever known had been hair twirlers.
“Do you want my snake?” the guy blurted. A bus roared by.
“Uh,” Lyla said. She glanced down at his zipper, thinking of what Kyle’d said the night before. About the metaphor.
The guy looked confused then turned a deep, deep shade of red, maybe even maroon, before jumping in to correct her. “No. No. I have a girlfriend. I mean this snake.” He lifted his shoulder a little. The snake’s tongue flicked in and out. Lyla decided she wanted to be the kind of woman who would own a Burmese python in her thirties.
And so she and Kyle ended up with the snake formerly known as Crackers, presently known as Buddy the Python, and the stupid thing had taken over their apartment.
At work Lyla pretended to love spreadsheets. She pretended to revel in the clacking of keys. Sometimes she would make it a point to tap out the rhythm of “Another One Bites the Dust” or “War Pigs” as she placed numbers in each tiny, perfect rectangle. No one ever caught on.
At lunch with her work friend, Tanya, she pretended to think about marrying Kyle, about having or adopting babies with him because this kind of conversation was the only kind of conversation Tanya ever wanted to have. And when she got home in the evenings, Lyla pretended to be someone who didn’t mind the fact that Kyle had recently relegated their spare room—the office where she’d previously hacked away at her poetry and he’d whiled away Saturday afternoons putting together terrariums that sold well on Craigslist—to Buddy.
“I did some research at work,” Kyle said from the couch. Buddy lay across the back of it.
Lyla put her bag down near the door and sat in the old purple chair across from him. “Yeah?” she said.
Kyle nodded. “After I finished shelving the new James Patterson books some kids came in looking for books on gators for a school project, so I was in the reptile section anyway. Look.” He handed her a stack of library books from the coffee table.
Lyla set them in her lap and opened the first book. How to Enjoy Your Python: A Complete Pet Owner’s Manual. She closed it and turned the stack spine-up. There were at least a dozen books of similar titles. “What did you learn?” she asked.
Kyle reached behind him and scratched the top of Buddy’s head. “That we were right to give him a room of his own.”
“Ah,” said Lyla. She liked the snake. She did. But she hadn’t been prepared for the frozen mice and the shedding and the musk. Kyle had taken to Buddy like white on rice, never once objecting to her impulse adoption. Snake Guy had simply given Buddy away, no questions asked. In hindsight it seemed a little weird.
Lyla stood. “I’m going to get some dinner going. Burritos.”
“Okay,” Kyle said. He flipped on the TV and turned to Animal Planet.
Lyla watched from the kitchen as she opened a can of black beans and chopped peppers and sautéed onions. It was a special on tree snails and how people, years ago, had come through and collected them for their lovely, swirled shells. She chopped green onions and imagined men trading for whichever of the lovely cream and white and brown shells they didn’t already have. After the program ended, she and Kyle ate burritos at the kitchen counter, in silence, while Buddy wound around the legs of their chairs, over and under and through, linking them with easy muscle.
On Tuesdays Lyla and Tanya ate cheap tacos from the food truck on the corner. Sometimes they had tamales. Today they didn’t. Lyla bought three pork tacos instead and sat across from Tanya’s mushroom quesadilla. She sipped a tamarind soda.
Lately Tanya had been inviting Susie-from-two-cubicles-down. Susie was a talker. She liked to bake pies, she hoped she’d find the courage to talk to Matt in accounting, she thought she might dye her hair ombre. Lyla was glad to have Tanya to herself today.
“Kyle and I got a python,” she said. It was the first true thing she’d ever said to Tanya.
Tanya raised a heavily penciled eyebrow and sunk her teeth into a wedge of quesadilla. “Why?” she mumbled between bites. Then: “Do you think I should have asked Susie to lunch, too?”
Lyla squinted up at grackle clamoring in the palm fronds. “The python seemed like a good idea.” She bit into a taco, chewed, swallowed. “We figured it would be good practice for the baby.”
Tanya hawked, choked. Chugged from a lemonade. Fluttered bright pink nails against her chest.
“Your what?” she gasped.
Lyla smiled—the small, quiet smile she’d cultivated exactly for the delivery of fake marriage-and-babies news to Tanya. “I just found out yesterday,” she said. “I haven’t even told Kyle yet.”
“Wow,” Tanya said. “What’s he going to say, do you think? Will he propose? Oh my god, what if he proposes?”
Lyla wondered, if the situation were real, what Kyle would do, what she would do.
Back in the office Lyla felt the news spread like a small, persistent breeze and wondered if she hadn’t gone too far.
Buddy was large to begin with, and within a few months of owning the snake, he’d grown to ten feet in length.
“Yeah.” Kyle nodded excitedly, pointing at yet another library book. “There was a study done in the nineties that said Burms can grow to ten feet in their first year.”
He was calling them Burms now, like a herp enthusiast.
At least he was enthusiastic about something, Lyla thought.
“That’s great, babe,” she said. She spooned curry over rice and then ate a mouthful of the concoction. “But we don’t have the license for a snake this big. Is he even chipped?” She’d done her research, too, and she was beginning to regret her impulse adoption, beginning to understand, maybe, why the snake guy had been willing to give Buddy up in the first place. The bills for just three months of his upkeep cost more than Lyla made in one.
Kyle shrugged. “Nah. Doesn’t matter. He’s never going to get out, so how would anyone know?”
Lyla thought of the many news articles she’d come across during downtime at work. Articles about toddlers smothered by wayward snakes with irresponsible owners—owners like them, she admitted. And articles about pythons snaking their way up through some unsuspecting elderly woman’s toilet, curling up around the plunger like a heart attack waiting to happen.
“But what if he does?” Lyla asked. “What if Buddy gets out of the room? It’s not exactly secure.”
Kyle closed his book and leveled his brown eyes at her. “Lyla. You brought the snake home. We’re responsible for it, okay? Plus, he’s pretty good company.” Buddy sat coiled in the corner by the TV, basking, Lyla assumed, in its warmth. “And we keep him in the office anyway. How’s he going to get out of a locked room?”
Since Lyla had told Tanya she was pregnant, every day at work felt like tip-toeing around landmines of good intentions. She walked in one morning to find a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting on her desk. Congratulatory cards and sympathetic chocolate (“work-day cravings are the worst!”) arrived on her desk. Tanya brought her a decaf latte one morning. Lyla hadn’t realized people at her job actually liked her. She hadn’t taken anything she said there seriously. When her boss called her in to talk about maternity leave, she realized—she had to miscarry, or get her period, pretend she’d simply lost track of her cycle.
A couple months later, Lyla woke to find Buddy knotted beneath the sheets at the foot of the bed. At first she’d thought that maybe it was Kyle playing footsie. They’d had a particularly bad fight the night before—something that started with a dirty fork on the counter and ended with income inequality—and after these kinds of fights Kyle would sometimes try to schmooze her into a better morning mood. Once, before Buddy, they’d fought about whether or not to move to a better neighborhood in a good school district for future children (he was in favor; she wasn’t so sure) and she’d woken up to breakfast in bed. Neither the school district conversation nor the breakfast had happened since.
But now there was Kyle, still asleep in the half-morning light, and Buddy tickling her toes with his flicking tongue. “Hi, Buddy,” she said. She was careful to slide out of bed slowly so that she wouldn’t startle him into striking. Even the most docile of Burms, she knew, would think food before foot. And if Buddy bit Kyle? Oh well. He deserved it for not listening when she’d voiced her concerns about Buddy’s room.
It was Saturday and Lyla dressed quickly in skinny jeans and a loose tank top. She wanted to look nice, but not like she was trying for something. She stopped at a Starbucks for a cinnamon dolce latte and parked at the intersection of Palm and Krome. She would wait.
Around eleven, Snake Guy crossed the street, slipping in and around half-clad tourists on their way to the beach. He wasn’t wearing a suit this time—just cargo shorts and a Guy Harvey shirt with sailfish splashed colorfully across the chest. Lyla got out of the car and ran to catch him. She didn’t even need to pretend to be someone desperate.
When they were sitting at a nearby Cuban deli, Starbucks coffee long-abandoned, café de leche and a plate of guava pastries between them, Lyla asked her question:
“Why did you get the snake?”
The man eyed her dubiously. “You’re paying for this coffee and stuff right? Because I don’t even know you.”
“Yes. And I’m Lyla. You are?” She tapped her foot beneath the table, impatient.
“Todd,” said Snake Guy. He took a sip of coffee and ripped off a corner of pastry.
“Okay, Todd,” said Lyla. “So why did you get the snake?”
Todd shrugged. The deli filled up around them, bustling with to-go orders and sit-downs playing checkers and at least three different languages. “I was bored,” he said. “I work in a cubicle doing payroll. I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. Then one day, on my lunch break, I see this guy selling lychee and baby Burmese pythons out of the back of his truck. Five bucks a pop.”
Lyla chewed her pastry. She wondered if Kyle was up and at the library yet. Or if he was getting foot stitches at the E.R. She didn’t check her phone.
“Okay,” she said. “So why’d you give him to me?”
Todd, she noticed, had muscular forearms—probably because of Buddy. A tattoo of the number seven peeked out from under his sleeve. He also wasn’t quick to answer.
“Look,” said Lyla. “It’s been, what, six months, seven? since you gave me the snake? And I didn’t ask the right questions. I’m just trying to ask the right questions.”
Todd nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I got a girlfriend.” He spread his hands wide across the table, splaying each of his fingers out like the legs of a starfish.
“You got a girlfriend,” Lyla said.
Todd nodded. “Yeah.”
She could tell by the way his face lit up that he really cared about his girlfriend. Lyla wondered if Kyle’s face did that when he talked about her. If he talked about her.
She liked the grey threaded through Todd’s hair and the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled. She could see why a woman would want to date him.
“Your girlfriend doesn’t like snakes?” Lyla asked.
Todd laughed. “No,” he said, smiling. “Not so much. The morning I ran into you, she made me take him out of the house. Said she’d leave me if I didn’t.”
Lyla stared at the embroidered art on the wall behind their table. Primary colors wound their way around and through each other to form a small house on a far shore with a light in the window.
When Lyla got back to the apartment, Kyle was gone and Buddy was still curled up in the bed. She read the paper, did the crossword and Sudoku, had some leftover curry and a stray piece of sourdough. It was a feeding day for Buddy, but she couldn’t lift him herself—he was almost 150 pounds by her best guess—so she tapped his nose with a stick so he’d know it was feeding time, and put a thawed-out rat in her favorite sheets. Buddy stretched himself out, tongue flickering, toward the rat. Mouth wide open, he sank his teeth into the poor dead mammal. This was the part of snake ownership that fascinated Lyla most—the lengthening of muscle beneath rippled skin, beautiful patches of caramel and cream and mahogany brown, the deliberate movement, wrapping of coils, the faux choking of something already dead.
Kyle didn’t come home that night or the next day or for three weeks after. He didn’t pick up the phone. He hadn’t left a note. Friends and family hadn’t heard from him, had no idea where he’d gone—or so they said. Lyla hadn’t managed to lure Buddy back into his room and she couldn’t trick him into the 32-gallon plastic trashcan the internet had said he’d fit in. She couldn’t move the snake, not even to release him into the Everglades—something she knew was strictly prohibited anyway—and neither Todd nor Kyle answered her texts.
Buddy grew and grew, first to twelve feet then to fourteen, but she didn’t have it in her to let him starve and she was too afraid to call animal control. She’d seen the shows. They arrested people for stuff like this. Every day, it seemed, when she came home from work it was to some new hell: snake shit on the couch, a shed skin in the bathroom, an ignored, limp rat in the middle of the kitchen.
Sometimes Lyla imagined her life six months into the future—never any more. Kyle would come back to collect some of his stuff. He would reach down to scratch Buddy, say, “Hey, fella,” and then he would turn to Lyla—Lyla who, she admitted, even in her fantasies, wouldn’t yet have been able to corral Buddy so that someone could come change the locks. So Kyle would use his key to come in and say, “Hey, babe” like he was just returning from a quick run to the store. Maybe he would even be carrying a gallon of milk to play it off. He was that stupid. And then, Lyla imagined, Buddy would coil around Kyle’s ankles, snapping bone and twisting him to the ground. He would wrap around her ex-boyfriend so that all she could see was his brown tuft of hair. She wouldn’t throw vinegar or hot water or anything at Buddy to stop him. She would let him, just this once, be the demon monster so many people thought Burmese pythons were.